Military and non-military vehicles moving through a hostile region may encounter multiple threats, such as enemy vehicles, ground troops, and/or artillery systems. Such threats may have weapon systems and may be equipped with multi-spectral sensors for obtaining information about target vehicles. For instance, a threat may be equipped with one or more passive sensors to obtain information about a target vehicle by detecting emissions from the target vehicle. An example of a passive sensor is an infrared (IR) sensor for detecting energy in the infrared band, such as thermal radiation, emitted by a target vehicle. A threat may also be equipped with one or more active sensors to obtain information about a target vehicle by irradiating the target vehicle with electromagnetic waves and detecting those waves that bounce back from the target vehicle. An example of an active sensor is a radar for transmitting and detecting radio frequency (RF) waves.
Threats may be located at known or unknown locations, and may have known or unknown capabilities for detecting and attacking target vehicles. A survivability planning system may analyze known threats prior to the start of a mission to improve vehicle survivability. For example, a survivability planning system may plan a safe route for a vehicle between a starting point and an ending point so as to avoid areas that are within detection and attack ranges of known threats.
Unknown threats, for example, those that “pop-up” during a mission, may be more challenging to defend against because a survivability planning system may lack sufficient time and information to automatically compute an optimal plan before a pop-up threat engages a target vehicle. As a result, conventional vehicles rely on human operators to decide when and where to position and route the vehicles with respect to pop-up threats. Survivability of such a vehicle thus depends directly on the information an individual operator has regarding an area of operation, locations of threats, and each threat's detection and attack capabilities against the vehicle in the specific environment.